Small, Small World
by trustingHim17
Summary: During her the Christmas break her senior year of high school, Grace and her siblings visit her dad in Colorado, of course. At her small church, she witnesses an almost family reunion. Pure fluff that's only KC b/c it mentions magic. Part of my Life of a Demigod/Life of Magician universe.


**This oneshot won't make a whole lot of sense if you haven't read Life of Magicians.**

"Man, it's cold out here!" I called out as I exited the building. "Race ya!"

I took off running. Amidst the expected protests, Machaela and Jesse shot after me, racing across the parking lot.

Senior year of high school had brought its very own version of chaos, but on a sunny but cold winter's day in Denver, I was focused on keeping my lead. The reward? First in line for lunch.

Church had just let out with an announcement by Pastor Derald that the annual Christmas lunch was going to be in the gym, and the three of us were the first ones out; all the adults took the slow route, in case of ice, and the other parents had managed to hold back their kids.

"Hey! No cheating!" I heard Machaela call from behind me as we passed the halfway mark across the lot. I tried to speed up, knowing what that meant. Jesse still passed me a moment later, though, slightly glowing as he tapped into the strength of Horus to run faster.

I thought about using another spell against him, but decided against it. I'd settle for teasing him relentlessly. We arrived at the gym with him a couple of paces ahead of me, claiming the right to be first in line.

We went inside as a group, out of breath and still laughing. And, of course, teasing Jesse for cheating. The gym itself was still empty, since the rest of the congregation was still walking over, but the hallway resounded with noise. I decided to investigate, and peeked out to find Remy, the son of the youth leader who happened to be a good friend of mine, running back and forth as his brother, Peter, chased him. I grinned, enjoying listening to them laugh, as neither could run without giggling like mad.

Remy noticed me immediately, and toddled over to hide behind my legs, but Peter had no fear of me. Remy ran another way once he realized I wasn't off-limits.

I returned to the gym to catch up to my siblings, passing a breathless Jared on the way there.

"Looking for the twins of terror?" I asked wryly. He nodded. "They went towards the front office." He waved a thank you and followed his sons. Ever since those two had learned to walk, Jared and his wife had been running in circles trying to keep up with the energetic boys.

After working my way through the crowd of people, several of which wanted to chitchat—even if I like the people, I still hate the crowd, and I just wanted out the other side—I finally made it back to the line, where I fell into place behind Jesse.

With so much food out, I had to pick and choose what I wanted and what I could eat, which was hard. Everything looked so good! But, we finally made our way to a table, where we caught up with a few friends over the meal.

After food came the traditional snowball fight, with every kid below eighteen—and some above—divided into two teams to throw snowballs at each other, which Jesse enjoyed a little _too_ much. Soon enough, our snowball fight between the two teams deteriorated into a sibling war. Running low on snow, we battled our way to the nearby field. There, the abundance of snow and absence of people made us get a bit lax, and we started using magic.

My favorite, for now, was the "make cold" spell Felix had taught me, and I used it to its full potential, flinging snowballs as fast as I could make them. Machaela harnessed her Ptah magic to make herself a snow fort, which she felt the need to make four feet tall. How in the world did she find that much snow?

Jesse took the simple route, throwing snowball after snowball, though I did notice a faint glow, telling me he was drawing Horus' strength again.

We were having a blast alone in that field, when suddenly we weren't alone any more.

I ducked one of Jesse's flying missiles—he can throw _hard_ —and happened to glance back toward the church. Jared was standing at the edge of the field, watching us, his expression fluctuating between amusement at our play and…was that shock or confusion?

I immediately dropped the snowball I had been forming, prompting my siblings to follow my gaze.

"Hey, Jared," I quickly said, trying not to look like the cat that ate the canary. "Don't mind us. Machaela and I were just getting payback for Jesse cheating in the race earlier."

He chuckled, his mind elsewhere. "Yes, I see that," he said softly, "and saw that. I just can't believe I never noticed before…" Something was off, which made me start to worry a bit. We'd never been attacked at church before, and I trusted Jared, but there was always a first time. For one, I had never seen Jared anything but confident, and he _never_ spoke softly. Actually, he and Jesse could compete for volume on most days. Moreover, what exactly had he seen for him to react like this? Even if he'd been standing there long enough to witness a couple of my spells, he shouldn't have been able to see them. And what had he seen earlier?

"Notice what?" I asked, stalling as I moved closer to my siblings. Holding one hand behind my back, I pulled my wand out of the Duat, just in case.

"How alike you look to two kids I once knew, many years ago." He focused on me, eyes lit as if he had just realized something. "Your first name is Paiten, isn't it?"

I raised an eyebrow at him; I had never told him that. I'm sure a clear question of _What's up with you?_ showed on my face. It seemed to snap him out of the daze a bit, anyway.

He reached into his pocket, bringing out a very familiar pen, in more ways than one. He always had it on him, using it to sign every document and write every note for his Bible studies. However, it also looked a lot like a pen Jesse carried, and I was willing to bet it had a matching Rockies label, though I knew for a fact Jared didn't watch baseball and his wife liked the Dodgers.

"Does Sarah know you carry a Rockies pen?" I blurted, ADHD taking control of my mouth.

Jared, knowing my tendency to blurt my thoughts, didn't pay attention to my question as I'd asked him to long before, but my off-topic question did affect my sister.

"Your wife's name is Sarah?" she asked, her stunned voice just barely above a whisper, and it occurred to me that neither of them had actually met Jared or Sarah before, even though the husband and wife were easily my closest friends in the church. I notice her pull a worn, faded letter out of her pocket—or maybe the Duat. She didn't seem to realize she held it, though, her eyes still fastened on Jared and his pen.

He nodded, knowing she had caught on to something I hadn't yet. I looked over at Jesse, who was staring at Jared in much the same fashion.

"Machaela," I muttered during their staring contest. Jared was staring at my siblings as if they'd just dropped from the sky, and I wanted to know if something was wrong. "What's going on?"

My sister still hadn't found her words, but Jared heard my question and answered, in a way. "About ten years ago, before Sarah and I were married, we lived in Nashville." He muttered a very familiar word, and the pen he still held expanded into a staff. "Walking near the Kentucky border one day, we found two kids in the middle of the woods." He left it at that, noticing that Machaela had focused on the staff.

I remembered the previous fall, when Machaela had told Mom and I about her life apart from us, and remembered the couple she had described fondly as the ones who took care of them after the accident, and it clicked, sending a spark through me of equal parts awe (at the small world), amusement (that my siblings were still frozen), and irritation (that I hadn't put this together before).

Finally deciding Machaela needed help coming out of her surprise, I poked her with my wand. "Well?" I said. "We can marvel at this small world later. Go give him a hug!" She and Jesse rushed him, nearly knocking him off his feet with the combined force of their hugs, which would be quite a feat considering his six-foot height.

After the hug, and once the general shock started to wear off, I crossed my arms at Jared, having put my wand away. "Seriously?" I told him, mostly teasing. "You knew my siblings and never told me?"

"What do you expect?" he shot back, keeping an arm around Machaela and Jesse, his own staff also back in pen mode. "You never said you had siblings."

I waved a hand at him. "That's beside the point. And since when did you live in Nashville for a while? You told me you were from Virginia."

He huffed. "We lived there maybe six months. Just long enough to help these two then get transferred here."

Jesse spoke up, "I never expected to see you in church. Since when did you follow God?"

"Yeah," Machaela remembered. "Sarah specifically said she had no use for God. How are you a youth leader now?"

"I said what, now?" a new voice asked. I glanced behind us to see Sarah making her way closer, probably in search of Jared.

I spoke up. "Have you met my siblings yet, Sarah?"

Machaela and Jesse rushed her without waiting for an answer, crushing her in a hug. As she went through the cycle starting with who are you? and ending with hugging them back, I wrapped Jared in a hug of my own.

"Thank you," I told him.

He hugged me back, but asked, "For what?"

"For making sure they were around for me to find again." I glanced back over to see a three-way hug still going. "I blamed myself for the wreck, both after the accident itself, and once I regained my memories this past summer."

"You forgot about the wreck?"

I nodded. "I still don't remember much of the time around the move. Mom says I sunk into an extremely deep depression, so much so that I stopped eating. She was forced to move out of Colorado because I needed a place to restart. We actually ended up about an hour's drive from Nashville." I shook my head. "Sixty miles from my siblings and I never knew. Anyway, once I had recuperated some, we moved again to an even smaller town near the Kentucky border. Most of my memories now pick back up in that tiny town."

He wrapped me in another hug as Sarah finally wandered closer, in the same position Jared had been in a moment ago.

"So since when do you follow God?" Jesse asked from his place at her side.

"It's because of you, in a way," Sarah answered, ruffling his hair. "You talked so much, with so many Bible stories woven into your normal conversation, I had to look a few of them up to remember the details. From there, I found myself reading more and getting interested, and got Jared in on it too. Now we work with kids every day, usually thinking of the brother and sister who fell into our lives and changed our path."

We were all silent for a moment, before I decided I'd had enough of the sappiness. "You know one thing that hasn't changed?" I asked, then launched a snowball at Jared before he could react.

The reunion deteriorated back into a snowball fight.

 **Hope you enjoyed this sidekick to Life of Magicians. Let me know what you thought!**


End file.
